At 11:36 AM 1/18/02 -0800, Rick McGowan wrote: >It is our job as a standarizing organization to standardize what is IN USE >so that (as a goal) people can standard-ly communicate those symbols >internationally without ambiguity. It is _NOT_ our job, and never will be >our job, to invent new symbols or rally around new symbols that we think >are cool or useful in any particular branch of study and then promote their >use.
In fact: The only time where we have added a recently invented symbol that we knew *not* yet to be in any actual use, was the euro symbol. This was not a revolutionary act ;-) on our part, but reflected the creditable representation by the European Commission that its use would be required in the very near future. If the American Mathematical Society (arguably the currently most influential publisher of mathematical papers world wide) were to institute a policy that from a given date, all manuscripts were required to use the symbol for 2 pi, instead of 2*pi -- in that hypothetical case, such a symbol could potentially be encoded before it's in actual use, especially if that move had resonated well in the math community and other publisher were likely to follow it. What distinguishes the real and hypothetical case set forth here, from the proposal at hand is a creditable commitment on part of a large and identifiable user community to begin use of a symbol, as soon as it is available. Even so, the situation would feel to the character encoding community as a very exceptional situation, fraught with residual risk of early obsolescence of the character. Why don't we postpone the rest of this discussion until the day it comes back with the kind of endorsements suggested in the case studies. A./
